Weather

Being something of an amateur weather enthusiast, I have a folder in my browser bookmark toolbar with links to local weather resources like Capital Weather and NWS Radar: links which I check obsessively about every fifteen seconds or so. Clicking on WXNation for DC yesterday to track approaching rain, I thought to myself, I should totally make my own personal weather center on my website, maybe something like Joelf’s Henchmen’s Helper, but lightweight.

So, I hereby unleash Brownpau Weather, aka “The Evil Overlord Capital Climate Command Center,” upon the internet.

In truth it’s really just a lazily thrown-together collection of crude hotlinks to various generous local and national providers of visual weather data: NWS Radar, Wunderground Radar, NOAA Geostationary Satellites, and city/sky webcams from NPS, WaPo, ABC7, and NBC4. I was also trying to figure out how to fetch and parse live METARS data with PHP before I realized that WeatherPixie already does that with a perfectly fine hotlinkable image for free.

Be sure to try out the annoying image-sizing rollover CSS effect.

It’s all rather amateur, but it satisfies my weather impulses for the time being. Assuming the image sources continue to allow remote linking, a similar solution should work for just about anyone who knows where to dig for the right image URLs.